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How online retail can catch up to brick and mortar

Ecommerce has been making its mark the past couple of years, but is still only a fraction of the overall retail industry.

Online retailers and ecommerce professionals have been eagerly speculating that online retail will soon overtake brick and mortar stores in terms of popularity and sales.

Despite optimistic holiday numbers, research has indicated that these speculations are simply not true.

Retail is growing in sales, but ecommerce only makes up a small fraction of that.

Online retail has no ceiling, unlike bricks and mortar stores. There is so much more room to grow for these businesses, and it’s easier for them to mimic brick and mortar routines than the other way around.

Here are some ways online retailers can take advantage of their online presence and exceed expectations:

Improve the customer experience

If you’re a regular reader of ecommerce blog posts, this might sound like a broken record. But, it’s one of the few major advantages brick and mortar retailers have over online retailers.

There isn’t a salesperson readily available on all ecommerce sites to answer questions for consumers–yet.

Do you use live chat on your site? Offering (and publicizing) live chat can be just as useful as having a salesperson in your virtual store. Approximately 73% of customers view live chat as the most satisfying form of customer service while shopping online.

Another way you can satisfy customers is providing large, clear images with different angles of your products online.

The clarity of the pictures, along with in-depth descriptions, can provide the customer with the similar experience as shopping in-store.

Increase your reach

As an online retailer, if you want to expand your market, you may need to incur some additional shipping costs to ship farther. However, they don’t even come close to the costs of a brick and mortar store being built, purchasing products, and hiring employees.

Expand your selling capabilities to larger markets in different parts of the world. Take China for example. Chinese ecommerce sales trump the United States’ by $121bn. Don’t let shipping costs deter you from that opportunity.

You should also adopt an effective shipping policy. One reason why Amazon is so popular among shoppers is because it requires sellers to ship their package within two days after the order was placed.

Fast, speedy delivery can provide the customer with more of a feeling of instant gratification.

Price dynamically

When you sell online, you can simply change your price with the click of a mouse or a tap on a mobile device.

With very few exceptions, in-store sellers have to print a new price, have someone go out on the floor, remove the old one, and replace it with the new one. Basically, it makes it hard to keep up.

Online retailers can adopt a dynamic pricing strategy and invest in automated repricing software to change their prices in accordance with market changes or changes in competitor prices. This enables them to have the best price available at any time of the day.

Big box retailers like Target and Walmart tried adopting price matching policies to compete with online prices over the 2014 holiday season, and the results were disappointing. Brick and mortar sales dropped 8%, and online retail’s increased by 13.9%.

Keeping up and gaining strength

Brick and mortar retailers are indubitably in the lead in the overall retail industry right now, but it doesn’t have to stay that way. Online retailers’ speed and efficiency can help them catch up to their brick and mortar counterparts, with a little bit of hard work of course.

Ecommerce still only makes up a fraction of retail as a whole, but I still believe online will play a big role in the future of retail. Soon enough, we may start seeing brick and mortar retailers being a mere fraction of ecommerce sales.

What do you think online retailers will have to do to become a bigger part of retail as a whole?